The title of the show is a bit longer and includes the name of the album that will come to life on stage: The B-side: ‘Negro folklore from Texas state prisons’, a record interpretation album. It is the album recorded in 1965 by Bruce Jackson, a folklorist who researched the prison farms of Texas in the sixties to collect the work songs that black prisoners sang when they worked in the fields.
The resulting album, this Negro folklore from Texas state prisons, brings together a series of songs, but also stories that the prisoners told. Now, all this material is put on live by the actors of The Wooster Group company on the stage of the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc, from July 13 to 15, within the Grec festival.
“The Wooster Group likes to work with technology: we use videos, films, slides,” explains director Kate Valk, who has been with the company for 44 years, first as a performer and now as a director. “At the beginning we already made use of television.”
One of the performers, Eric Berryman, who buys his espadrilles “like Dalí’s” from manufacturers in Canada, explains how they do it: “In this performance we take the album live and perform it, song after song. It’s not karaoke, but we try to bring the record to life. If there’s a cough, we take it to the show. In the same way that if they laugh there is also laughter. As it was recorded in prisons, sounds and noises from the environment are heard”.
The songs are performed a cappella by the three actors, who hear them through the headset, but the audience does not hear the original. “Eric Berryman, Philip Moore and Jasper McGruder bring the pieces to life,” says Valk, who bought the idea from the former while he served her tea at the establishment where he worked.
“In the montage there is no fiction, they are not black men pretending to be the prisoners; they are black men who bring the past into the present. When they interpret, the spirits visit them, they appear”, adds the director.
“These are very real songs, very painful and also vital. When slavery disappeared, the US found another way to subjugate blacks: jail”, concludes McGruder.
